After days of withering criticism for a policy of holding back third graders who opt out of the state test, after failing to get any support from the State Education Department, the school officials of Manatee County, Florida, backed down and agreed that third grade students could use alternative methods to be promoted to fourth grade.
Peter Greene updated his post here.
Eva Moskowitz agreed to open a pre-K program on behalf of the City of New York. But she refused to sign the contract that other charter schools (and all public schools and facilities) agreed to sign. Eva said that the city was not her boss, even though the money for the program came from the city.
She refused to back down. She refused to sign the contract. She canceled the pre-K program, for the fall, which enrolled about 70 children at a cost to the city of about $700,000.
Success Academy Charter Schools Cancels Pre-K
After months of fighting with City Hall about a prekindergarten contract, Success Academy Charter Schools said Wednesday it was canceling its pre-K program for the fall.
For nearly a year the charter’s founder, Eva Moskowitz, has refused to sign a contract that New York City requires of providers who participate in its public pre-K program. She says it aims to exert too much control over her curriculum, daily schedule and field trips.
City officials have said that every other pre-K provider, including charter schools, signed the same basic contract, and doing so was a clear condition of joining the initiative. Expanding public preschool has been a key part of Mayor Bill de Blasio’s agenda.
Ms. Moskowitz has said the charter oversight body at the State University of New York is the proper authority over her network. State Education Commissioner MaryEllen Elia ruled in the city’s favor in February, saying pre-K is a state-funded grant program, rather than part of the K-12 levels overseen by SUNY.
Ms. Moskowitz appealed to the state Supreme Court earlier this year, but said Wednesday that the court’s decision would come too late to open doors in August, and families of admitted children must scramble to find alternatives.
“It is unbelievably sad to tell parents and teachers that the courts won’t rescue our pre-K program from the mayor’s war on Success in time to open next year,” she said in a news release.
“The state upheld our important standards to ensure all programs are high quality,” Department of Education spokeswoman Devora Kaye said.
Success Academy started a prekindergarten program for 72 children in four classrooms last August, and planned to expand slightly for the next school year. A spokesman said about 3,000 children entered an admissions lottery for about 100 seats for the coming year.
Ms. Moskowitz and Mr. de Blasio have clashed repeatedly over the city’s obligation to provide space for charters and other issues. She said she hopes for a court victory so she can reopen prekindergarten classes in August 2017.
A spokesman said she is still seeking $720,000 reimbursement from the city for the current school year.
Mercedes Schneider noticed something curious in the reports of the Gates Foundation:
Despite the CEO’s pledge to “double down” in shoving CCSS on unwilling schools and teachers, the Gates Foundation has not handed out a single CCSS grant in 2016.
Oh, also, Sue Desmond-Hellman cites ACT data. As Peter Greene pointed out in another post, the student who is gifted in music and the humanities is not “college ready” unless she also gets high scores in science. And the brilliant young scientis is not “college ready” unless his test scores in the humanities are equally stellar.
Standardization has downsides.
Since former Governor Bobby Jindal took control of the state education department in Louisiana, there have been numerous battles over access to public information.
The state superintendent appointed by Jindal, ex-TFA Broadie John White, has just made plain that public information is not public.
Mercedes Schneider reports that White has sued a citizen who made the mistake of seeking information from the state education department. Apparently John White doesn’t realize that he works for the public and is paid by the public.
As she says, this is a new low.
Walt Gardner is an experienced educator who writes a blog in Education Week. In a Memorial Day post, he warns that the anti-testing movement is going too far, too fast, and is likely to generate a backlash. He argues that the public is entitled to know how schools are doing, and standardized tests provide them with information they want and need. He concludes that the tests should be better, more carefully vetted, and serve diagnostic purposes.
His concern is reasonable, but I don’t think he is fully cognizant of the reasons that so many parents have decided to opt out.
Let me run through a few of them and invite you to add others.
I say, until we come up with better, more valuable, reliable, and effective ways of measuring student progress, let’s ditch the tests we have now. They accomplish nothing, at great cost.
Massachusetts is the latest battlefield over the question of how to evaluate teachers. At the center of the conflict is the favorite idea of Arne Duncan and Bill Gates: evaluating teachers by the test scores of their students (or if not their students, someone else’s students). The new Every Student Succeeds Act relieved states of the obligation to tie teacher evaluations to students scores. Oklahoma and Hawaii recently dropped the measure, which many researchers consider invalid and unreliable.
The state plans to impose its evaluation system on all teachers, including teachers of the arts and physical education. How the state will measure the students’ growth in music or art or sports is not clear.
Researchers at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst studied the plan and criticized it:
A 2014 report by the Center for Educational Assessment at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, which examined student growth percentiles, found the “amount of random error was substantial.”
“You might as well flip a coin,” Stephen Sireci, one of the report’s authors and a UMass professor at the Center for Educational Assessment, said in an interview. “Our research indicates that student growth percentiles are unreliable and should not be used in teacher evaluations. We see a lot of students being misclassified at the classroom level.”
The Massachusetts Teachers Association, the largest teachers’ union in the state, has come out in opposition to the plan, as has the Massachusetts Association of School Committees, representing the state’s elected school board.
But state officials, led by state Commissioner Mitchell Chester, insist that they won’t back down. Boston’s superintendent, Tommy Chang, a graduate of the unaccredited Broad Superintendents Academy, is acting to implement the evaluations.
A centerpiece of Massachusetts’ effort to evaluate the performance of educators is facing mounting opposition from the state’s teacher unions as well as a growing number of school committees and superintendents.
At issue is the state’s edict to measure — based largely on test scores — how much students have learned in a given year.
The opposition is flaring as districts have fallen behind a state deadline to create a “student impact rating,” which would assign a numeric value to test score growth by classroom and school. The rating is intended to determine whether teachers or administrators are effectively boosting student achievement. The requirement — still being implemented — would apply to all educators, including music, art, and gym teachers.
“In theory it sounded like a good idea, but in practice it turned out to be insurmountable task,” said Glenn Koocher, executive director of the Massachusetts Association of School Committees. “How do you measure a music teacher’s impact on a student’s proficiency in music? How do you measure a guidance counselor’s impact on student achievement?”
Critics question whether the data can be affected by other factors, including highly engaged parents or classrooms with disproportionate numbers of students with disabilities or other learning barriers. The requirement has also created problems in developing assessments for subjects where standardized tests are not given, such as in art and gym.
Resistance has escalated in recent weeks. On Thursday, the state’s largest teachers union, the Massachusetts Teachers Association, as well as others successfully lobbied the Senate to approve an amendment to the state budget that would no longer require student impact ratings in job evaluations. A week earlier, the Massachusetts Association of School Committees passed a policy statement urging the state to scrap the student impact ratings.
But some educators see value in the student impact ratings. Mitchell Chester, state commissioner for elementary and secondary education, defended the requirement, which has been more than five years in the making.
Commissioner Chester is deeply involved with the Common Core and the tests for Common Core. Until recently, he was chair of the PARCC Governing Board.
The educational turmoil in Massachusetts is baffling. It is the nation’s highest-scoring state on standardized tests, yet school leaders like Mitchell Chester can’t stop messing with success. Although they like to say they are “trying to close the achievement gap” or they are imposing tougher measures “to help minority students,” these are the children who fall even farther behind because of the new tests, which are harder than past tests, and are developmentally inappropriate, according to teachers who have seen them.
What is happening in Massachusetts is the epitome of “reform” arrogance. Why doesn’t Commissioner Chester support the fine teachers he has and fight for better funding and smaller classes in hard-pressed urban districts like Boston?
Paul Thomas has been writing thoughtfully about the defects of education journalism for the past several months. He is obviously frustrated that there is so little investigative reporting, that so many writers rely on press releases, that they seem unable to interpret research, and that education writers all too often know so little about the history of education.
In his latest article on the subject, he offers as an example the misreporting of “grit,” which became a media sensation because of a bestseller (How Children Succeed) by Paul Tough, citing the research of Angela Duckworth. Suddenly, “grit” was everywhere, the secret of success. And now the National Assessment of Educational Progress (the nation’s report card) will be assessing grit, even though there is no common definition of what it is and a very thin research base for its importance. We don’t even know that “grit” can be taught. Angela Duckworth wrote an op-ed for The New York Times opposing the testing of grit, and Paul Tough says in his new book Helping Children Succeed that he doubts that grit can be taught. (I will review it in the next few weeks.) Thomas complains that journalists did not question “grit,” they simply reported on it, found examples of it, celebrated it, recycled claims without evidence.
Thomas lists 12 ways in which education journalism fails, but each of those criticisms contains a suggestion about how education journalism might succeed.
For example, Thomas warns against the common practice of finding “miracle schools,” which are feel-good stories that often turn out to be false.
He warns against the danger of presenting”education research and science in simplistic terms and failing to couch any one study in the context of the broader body of research or against unbiased reviews of that study. Especially since mainstream media are contracting, edujournalism is even more susceptible to press-release journalism—simply restating what aggressive researchers and think tanks send to the media without regard for whether or not that research is credible (thus, above, the overstating by both Duckworth and media coverage).”
He warns against the danger of “remaining trapped in rankings and state-to-state or international comparisons. Not only are rankings and comparisons mostly misleading, in many cases, the rankings are fabricated (seeking ways to force a ranking instead of admitting that the objects ranked are essentially the same), and comparisons are made at superficial levels that ignore significant differences in what is being compared.
He warns about “uncritically embracing crisis discourse about education that ignores historical patterns involving education, poverty, and racism. Current “crisis” education stories about “bad” schools, “bad” teachers, and “kids today” have been recycled in the U.S. since at least the mid-1800s. The “crisis” label allows edujournalists, politicians, and the public to ignore social and policy causes for the consequences being identified as the “crisis….”
Thinking without an ounce of imagination. Accountability, standardized testing, grades, grade levels—these and dozens of “normal” and “traditional” practices are never realistically challenged in edujournalism; no consideration is given to things could be otherwise. A failure of imagination is seeking out and believing in new tests and new standards; imagination allows us to rethink a better school system without tests and without standards.
Read on to see the other fallacies and errors into which journalists may slip if not wary. Each of them points the way to better, more thoughtful, more skeptical reporting.
Students at the Amistad High School, the crown jewel of the no-excuses Achievement First charter chain, walked out to protest the lack of diversity among the school’s teachers and the arbitrary discipline.
“Administrators overseeing the Achievement First Amistad charter high school promised to “do better” Tuesday after hundreds of black and Latino students walked out in protest to air longstanding complaints about racial insensitivity.
“The students massed on the football field of the Dixwell Avenue charter school after arriving on buses, then marched on the street chanting “What do we want? Diversity! When do we want it? Now! Now!”
“Some 98 percent of the school’s 498 students are black or Latino, according to its website. Most of the teachers are white.
“The school emphasizes that it grooms students to be leaders — and the students took them up on that mission at Tuesday’s orderly protest.
“They charged that a racially insensitive climate had led most of the black teachers to leave and to indiscriminate discipline.
“The protests brought into the open complaints students and parents have had about the racial climate in the school.
“The school has young teachers that can’t handle the classroom,” said Kordell Green, one of the organizers.”
Martin Levine, writing in NonProfit Quarterly, reviews the latest statement by the President of the Gates Foundation, Sue Desmond-Hellman, and concludes that the foundation is unwilling to learn from its mistakes.
After Bill Gates had invested hundreds of millions of dollars in creating small schools, he abruptly abandoned that idea and moved on, with little reflection.
“The foundation’s lessons learned from this experience did not result in any questioning of their core belief that the answer to building a more equitable society would be found within our public schools. They just shifted their focus to increasing the number of charter schools, creating test-based teacher evaluation systems, improving school and student data management, and setting universal standards through the common core curriculum. Each has struggled, and none appear to have been effective.
“In 2014, the BMGF supported InBloom, an effort to create a national educational data management system, shut down after parents protested the collection and storage in the cloud of data on their children. Various states withdrew their support, and NPQ reported last September on the failure of one of these Gates-funded initiatives, Empowering Effective Teachers.
“Desmond-Hellman has led the foundation as it has invested heavily in the effort to create a national set of learning standards, the Common Core Curriculum. Despite over $300 million in foundation funding, alliances with other large foundations, and strong support from the U.S. Department of Education, the effort has drawn bitter opposition and decreasing support. The strong push that the DoE gave states to implement the Common Core was seen as an unwanted intrusion of federal power into local schools. The use of Common Core to build a testing regimen for students and teachers was seen as disruptive and ineffective. Test data show little impact on bridging the inequity gap in states using Common Core.
“Would not an organization that seeks to be a learning organization want to step back and consider whether their core assumptions are on target in light of their difficult experiences? Perhaps, but not the Gates Foundation. Desmond-Hellmann remains “optimistic that all students can thrive when they are held to high standards. And when educators have clear and consistent expectations of what students should be able to do at the end of each year, the bridge to opportunity opens. The Common Core State Standards help set those expectations.” Not a word about the impact of poverty, or the trauma of community violence, or systemic racism as even small considerations.”
In a display of smugness, the Gates Foundation blames public resistance to the Common Core on the critics, not on their assumptions about school reform.
What the Gates Foundation has thus far demonstrated is the inability to say, “We were wrong.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 